Czech literature

Czech literature, the body of writing in the Czech language. Before 1918 there was no independent Czechoslovak state, and Bohemia and Moravia—the Czech-speaking regions that, with part of Silesia, now constitute the Czech Republic—were for a long time provinces of the Habsburg Holy Roman and Austrian empires. Because of this, the evolution of the Czechs’ literary language became historically linked to their efforts to maintain their ethnic identity.

Origins and development through the 17th century

The earliest origins of literature in Czech are connected with Old Church Slavonic, which was devised by Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century to counter Frankish (German) influence. Latin was established as the liturgical language of the Bohemian state in 1097, however, and its script was adopted for what would become the Czech language. The earliest preserved texts in the Czech language, mainly hymns, were written in the late 13th century at the courts of the Přemyslid kings of Bohemia.

The 14th century brought a continuous stream of Czech literary works, mostly consisting of biographies of saints (hagiography), legends, epics and chronicles, and adaptations of chivalrous romances, all in verse. The earliest secular work in the language was the epic Alexandreis, a life of Alexander the Great based on a Latin poem by the French writer Gautier de Châtillon. From about 1350, prose genres began to be cultivated, initially descriptions of the lives of saints and chronicles and then versions of popular medieval tales. From the last part of the century dated a group of verse satires and didactic poems as well as the political allegory Nová rada (“The New Council”), written by Smil Flaška to defend the rights of the Bohemian nobility against the crown.

Hus, JanThe Granger Collection, New YorkReligious reforms begun by Jan Hus in the early 15th century set in motion the Hussite movement, which for two centuries pitted Czech reformers or Protestants against the Roman Catholic rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. The religious controversies and civil strife of this period fostered the use of Czech writing for practical and polemical purposes. Hus himself composed strong sermons in Czech and wrote various treatises, of which De ecclesia (“The Church”) was the most important. Petr Chelčický, one of his successors, wrote treatises containing radical social ideas from which sprang the Unitas Fratrum, or Bohemian Brethren, a sect and prototype of the Moravian church that became an important source of Czech literature for the next two centuries.

Czech literature in the 16th century was predominantly didactic and scholarly, reflecting the humanism of the European Renaissance. The Moravian bishop Jan Blahoslav completed an early translation of the New Testament, and the lexicographer Daniel Adam of Veleslavín further enriched the vocabulary of humanist Czech, but the most significant landmark of the period was the Unitas Fratrum scholars’ translation of the Bible into Czech, known as the Kralice Bible (1579–93). The language of this version became the model for classical Czech.

The Austrian Habsburgs defeated the Protestants of Bohemia in 1620, after which Protestantism was eradicated and Bohemia was brought under direct rule within the Austrian Habsburg domain. The (largely Protestant) Bohemian nobility was crushed and replaced by newcomers with little knowledge of Czech. Under the Habsburgs, the literary traditions of the past two centuries were proscribed, and it was only among political exiles that Czech literature survived at all. Among these exiles Jan Ámos Komenský (John Amos Comenius) was preeminent. His Latin works on education and theological problems and his works in Czech revealed him as a writer and thinker of European stature. His Labyrint světa a rájsrdce (1631; “Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart”) stands as one of Czech literature’s great achievements in prose.

The 18th and 19th centuries

By the 18th century, however, Czech had practically ceased to be used for higher literary purposes. The historicism and antiquarianism of the late 18th century led many Czech scholars to investigate their country’s earlier literature and history. Moreover, Bohemian patriotism revived in reaction against the centralizing tendencies of the Habsburg government under the empress Maria Theresa. These two phenomena combined with currents of the Romantic movement to inaugurate a Czech national literary revival in the first half of the 19th century. At the same time, social and economic developments were helping create a new middle-class audience for Czech literature.

Czech Romanticism drew impetus from the efforts of both scholars and literary artists. The scholar Josef Dobrovský studied and codified a revived Czech literary language. Josef Jungmann set out to extend and modernize the Czech vocabulary through his translations (including John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1811) and his monumental Czech-German dictionary (1835–39). The revival was also furthered by the Moravian historian František Palacký and the Slovak archaeologist Pavel Josef Šafařík. The Slovak Jan Kollár, who wrote in Czech, produced the first significant work in the revived language with his allegorical sonnet cycleSlávy dcera (“The Daughter of Sláva”). Interest in early Czech literature was further stimulated by several brilliant hoax manuscripts, purported to be from the early Middle Ages but actually written by Václav Hanka, which have held their own as examples of Romantic poetry.

The greatest poet of Czech Romanticism, and perhaps of all Czech poets, was Karel Hynek Mácha. His lyrics, prose fragments, and a lyrical epic, Máj (1836; May), showed the influence of Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and the Polish Romantics but transcended these influences by its intensity of poetic vision and perfection of language. In the 1840s there was a reaction against the Romantic vision. The political journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský and the novelist Božena Němcová were both concerned with practical issues and did much to emancipate Czech prose from the older classical manner, bringing it nearer to everyday speech. Němcová became best known for Babička (1855; “The Grandmother”), an idealized portrayal of country life in sketches whose precise, realistic descriptions and firmly individual language were new in Czech prose.

The Máj group, named in honour of Mácha’s great lyrical epic, was a school of writers in the second half of the 19th century who sought to create a Czech literature imbued with their own liberal and pragmatic nationalist aims. Prominent in their ranks was the poet and short-story writer Jan Neruda, known for his sardonic sketches in Povídky malostranské (1878; “Tales of Little Quarter”). Other notable figures of the Máj group were the novelist Karolina Světlá and the poet Vítězslav Hálek.

By the 1870s Czech literature had fully established itself in poetry and the novel but not yet in the drama. Literary life crystallized around two groups associated with the periodicals Lumír and Ruch (“Stir”). The former stressed the need to Europeanize Czech literature, while the latter looked to the strength of native traditions and themes. The leading representative of the cosmopolitan tendency was Jaroslav Vrchlický (pseudonym of Emil Frída), who was probably the most prolific of all Czech writers. His lyrics show an amazing mastery of language, while a vast cycle of historical epics contain probably his best work. But his greatest influence was exercised by his many translations of major European writers. Cosmopolitanism also found expression in Julius Zeyer’s novels and short stories. The principal figure in the nativist trend was Svatopluk Čech, who composed historical epics, idyllic pictures of Czech country life, and prose satires aimed at the philistinism of the Czech middle classes.

The Czech novel of the late 19th century exhibited a trend toward realistic description in the works of the historical novelists Alois Jirásek and Zikmund Winter. Both men presented romanticized versions of Czech history, but their historical details were based on scholarly research. Jirásek’s novels presented an entire history of the Czechs up to his own time, concentrating in particular on the Hussite period and the national revival of 1780 onward. In the last decade of the century new trends in poetry began to appear in the works of Josef Svatopluk Machar, Antonín Sova, Otakar Březina (pseudonym of Václav Jebavý), and Petr Bezruč (pseudonym of Vladimír Vašek). Březina expressed a personal religion in a language of great subtlety and originality, and his metrical structures (including free rhythms) had great influence on later poets. Bezruč was a regional poet, obsessed by the national and social oppression of the Moravians of German-ruled Silesia, but in his powerful verse he achieved national and universal relevance.

After 1918

With the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state in 1918, Czech literature flourished. Czech drama came into its own in the idealistic and satirical plays of Karel Čapek and František Langer. Čapek’s best plays exposed the threats of a centralized, mechanized society of the 20th century: R.U.R. (1920), which introduced the word robot into English, and Ze života hmyzu (1921; The Insect Play). Narrative prose reached a new peak with such writers as Čapek, Jaroslav Hašek, Vladislav Vančura, Ivan Olbracht, and Jaroslav Havlíček. Shortly after World War I ended Hašek began his sequence of novels called Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války (1921–23; The Good SoldierSchweik). These works set in the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire remain widely read to the present day. Čapek’s fiction included Wellsian fantasies, subtle psychological studies, and short stories.

In the period between 1918 and 1945, the lyric poetry of Jakub Deml, Josef Hora, František Halas, Vítězslav Nezval, and Jaroslav Seifert exhibited great vitality and variety, with work of the highest quality being produced. After World War II, however, the newly established communist regime suppressed free literary activity and permitted only works conforming to the drab and restrictive tenets of Socialist Realism. Czech writing consequently underwent a marked decline. When strict political controls were relaxed in the early 1960s, the novels of Josef Škvorecký and Milan Kundera, the short stories of Bohumil Hrabal and Arnošt Lustig, the poetry of Miroslav Holub, and the plays of Václav Havel began attracting international attention. In the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, many of these writers were suppressed in Czechoslovakia, though their reputations continued to grow abroad. Of the writers who emigrated to Western countries, Kundera, Lustig, Škvorecký, and Pavel Kohout soon attained prominence in their adopted countries. During that same period, belated interest was shown abroad in the achievements of Czech lyric poetry in the interwar period, and Seifert, its chief surviving representative, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. After the democratic revolution of 1989, freer literature flourished, and the playwright Václav Havel, who had been a dissident, became president of Czechoslovakia and, later, of the Czech Republic.

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